More and more people are using the term "people of faith." It's a creation of the Christian Right to help divide Americans even more and depict themselves as the only true defenders of religion in America. Will it work?
Nicholas Von Hoffman writes:
The term "people of faith" has come to be used interchangeably with the word "American." If there's a politician left in the United States who doesn't season his speech with tremulous references to the "peoples of faith," I can't recall his name.
The expression "people of faith" conveys the idea of a holy (or not-so-holy) alliance of religions, united for good against the disorganized forces of anarchic relativists, secularists, and people of little or no faith. They have values -- a good thing. The rest of us (few in number though we may be) stand for what is destructive of hearth, community and country -- a bad thing.
The people of faith are sympathetic to the Republican Party and its objectives. Democrats, intimidated by the religiosity loose in the country, have come to accept the premise that the test of public policy is how a measure is greeted by the faith community.
Hoffman argues that we need to be able to challenge religion itself, not just the Religious Right, and he has a point. As extremist as the Religious Right may be, it's still religion at the heart of their movement. People rarely challenge the presumption that faith and religion are unmitigated goods and this is part of the fundamental problem.
So long as people aren't skeptical or cynical of religion, then religious demagogues will be able to get away with just about anything. Religion doesn’t need to be the problem, but it will be the problem as long as it's allowed a position beyond questioning and challenges.
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